


i'll be a sky

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Flashbacks, Future Fic, Gen, Reunions, Slow Burn, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:27:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28228374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: She looks like something out of one of his stories. No, she looks like she has a good story or two of her own to tell, this Marianne; sweet-voiced and steady-eyed, everything and nothing at all like he remembers.He’s sure it must be the mirror of his own expression he sees in her face a beat later, when her gaze comes up to meet his—naked surprise, then recognition. A flicker of doubt. Recognition again.In which Claude and Marianne arrive at the same place by different roads.
Relationships: Golden Deer Students & Claude von Riegan, Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 15
Kudos: 36





	i'll be a sky

**Author's Note:**

> This fic, which has been growing at glacial pace in my mental backyard since literally January like some kind of monster turnip, is marked canon divergent because I looked at the Mariclaude paired ending, thought _I_ could _write something that spins off of this,_ and decided instead to make my life difficult in ways including, but not limited to, inventing a fictional place nearly from scratch. And also because I’m drawn to people finding each other in places that are comfort zones for neither of them, what can I say.
> 
> There is a [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuz3Ns1Ub9SpdE8vnTy_RXsAHf8GonNDs) for this fic, which is yours to listen to at your pleasure. The title comes from [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bbFLYCCOBk&list=PLuz3Ns1Ub9SpdE8vnTy_RXsAHf8GonNDs&index=4)
> 
> Many thanks, as always, to the writing house. Specialest specialest thanks to May and Ceece, Juno, Gwen, and Mandy, for never letting me be alone on the road.
> 
> This is the story I’ve wanted to write all year. If you miss the outside world as much as I do, consider yourself its dedicatee. Don’t worry—the sky’s still there, somehow.

_Before I started to love you,  
I tried to love the world:_

_— Mary Szybist, “What the World Is For”_

* * *

There once was a king who had seven wives, who bore him seven sons, and he was blessed—or cursed, depending on who you thought to ask—to love them all the same.

Indeed, so deep and equitable was the king’s love that when the time came for him to declare an heir, he gave the people no name. Instead, he gathered his sons at his feet, as though they were boys still, jostling each other playfully for nothing more than a warm place before the fire, and he said to them, _My sons, you are each of you my arm, and my rib, and a piece of my heart. Thus I bid you all go out now into the wide world and see what there is to see beyond the borders of your father’s kingdom, and let it be he who brings back the most wondrous tale next Midsummer Day who one day wears my crown._

And so it was that the king’s sons, who loved their father and one another just as well, left the kingdom where they were born—each by a different road, following a different set of stars. In a year and a season’s time, at Midsummer Day, six of them returned the way they had come, to tell their father the story of the long days that had passed in between.

The eldest prince, who had since boyhood held dreams of one day becoming a warrior of legend, did not return, and his presence was missed immediately in his father’s court. The second prince had heard tell that his brother had pledged his sword to a great war being waged among the island kingdoms to the west, a war in which it was said a thousand ships had been put to sea, and that this was the last any had heard from him since.

For his own part, said the second prince, his journey had taken him north toward the mining cities, and down into the deepest mine that had been dug into the earth since the birthing of the world. There, he said, he had discovered veins of gold so rich as might double the fortune in the king’s vaults, easily, and then double that again.

The third prince had climbed a mountain, he said, and spoken with a dragon, and been allowed to take from its wing a single silver scale as proof of its friendship. The fourth had sailed the world’s seas end to end aboard the fastest ship ever built, while the fifth had befriended a genius inventor from the southern lands, who had built him a pair of wings made out of wax, by which he might explore the skies. The sixth said he had come home only to renounce his claim to the throne, as he had already earned the love of the most beautiful man in the world—a young goatherd with bright eyes and a voice like the breezes sighing in the gold grass, who traveled the plains outside their city, and had become the only thing his lonely heart could bring itself to want.

And the youngest prince, who had been the last to arrive, having ridden into the city aboard his faithful horse when the lanterns had long been lit and the feasts of midsummer were well underway, said that he had ridden east, and kept riding, with no particular grand aim or direction. He had stopped when he had to, in the towns and the homesteads that dotted the steppe, and spoken freely with whoever suited him, and after many moons of allowing the wind to bear him where it would, he came at last upon a secluded valley where a river ran between three villages. Now these villages, he said, were not large, or grand, or possessed of any great riches or wonders save one—that the people who lived in them seemed content to share everything the land had to offer, mingling easily with one another at the river’s edge, speaking to one another in a common language only they could understand.

From where he sat at the head of the feasting table, one hand cradling a copper goblet of wine that shone nearly gold in the light from the lamps, the king fixed his eyes upon his son—his youngest boy, whom he loved just as well as all the rest, for all that he had been born smaller than the others, and weaker, and more prone to wandering. This boy who made his way with only his wits and his easy smile and an old silver bow, offering his friendship to the world itself.

 _And these three villages,_ he said, and it was not a question, _these three villages and their river were the most miraculous thing you saw._

 _Oh, yes, father,_ said the youngest prince, smiling, as he poured himself more wine. _It’s the miracle of human generosity._

* * *

“That’s a clever tale you told there,” the innkeeper at the House of Two Skies tells Claude, as he pulls a stool up to the bar. “The world so full of riches and wonders for these princes of yours to discover, and yet the most miraculous thing is a place where the people share everything.”

It’s after suppertime now, and most of the other guests, sated for food and entertainment both, have gone back upstairs to their rooms, or wandered out into the open courtyard to admire the moon. Those left in the dining hall aren’t doing much more than lingering at table, nursing a last piece of bread or fruit or a cup of wine—but the cup the innkeeper sets before Claude, burnished bronze and etched all up the sides with climbing roses, is his first of the night. No teller of tales drinks, as a rule, until his audience has had their fill.

“In a world like ours, it’s more likely some manner of war would start over which village had the best claim to the river and its resources.” He leans his elbows against the countertop and watches her as she busies herself with wiping the bar to either side of him down. “It’s miraculous because it’s inconceivable, or nearly. That’s what miracles are, no?”

“On your side of the sea, perhaps, stranger. But here in Morfis, we live side by side with magic—everything’s a wonder, and therefore nothing is.” The innkeeper’s eyes, Claude notes, crinkle at the edges when she smiles. She wears her fair hair close-cropped, out of her face. She can’t be much older than him, for all she runs such a tight ship. “Still, you’ve a quick wit and a silver tongue. I’ve housed a good number of storytellers under my roof in my time, but none quite so funny as you.”

It's true, Claude thinks as he swirls the wine in his cup and drinks deep, that the roads of Morfis must be paved with miracles. Even from the air, they’d seemed to bend and twist in strange directions, leading everywhere and nowhere, impossible to map by sight. All arid land beyond the walls, scrub and sand dunes as far as the eye could see, but a fountain on every corner within. A celebrated school of magic sitting enthroned atop a high hill, turreted and gleaming, but no way to reach it, even flying in a straight line—always the hill had seemed to recede, curiously, its image flickering at the edges.

It amuses him so, to imagine that something about him might still be remarkable, in a city like this. He might burst out laughing right here and scare the innkeeper’s lean sand-colored hound, who’s come out from behind the counter to sniff at his shoes.

“You know what they say about how the path a person takes through the desert has a way of showing them who they are,” he says, reaching down to rub the dog behind the ears, smiling when it whines softly and pushes its head close against his hand. “I’m honored if you think mine has made me funny, my lady innkeeper.”

“Call me Ametrine. Everyone does. And the young master at your feet there is Larkspur; he has the real run of this place.” Ametrine, for those eyes, no doubt—for how they’ve got a bit of gold in them Claude knows better than to chalk up just to the lamplight. Those eyes are fixed on his face now, measuring. “And how am I to call you, since you and that silver tongue of yours mean to stay a long while?”

In Morfis, perhaps more than anywhere else, names are things of power, too—given at birth by one of the city’s great Masters, and then kept secret lifelong from all but one’s most trusted. In contrast, the name for everyday life, the name a person faces the world with, might be chosen, or given, changed and discarded at any time. This is magic even Claude can do, if only because he’s gotten used to carrying a handful of names around in his pocket. He always makes sure to choose them on the road.

“Kite will do,” he says. “I have a soft spot for things that fly.”

“Swanning in here on that magnificent wyvern of yours, I never would have guessed.” Ametrine laughs, and tops up his cup. “Master Kite. Be welcome in my house for as long as you like.”

* * *

_What does the world look like to you?_

It’s got to be the biggest question anyone’s ever asked Claude. The first and the last, and the one all the other big questions come home to, even the one time the Professor asked him all that long time ago, in the shadow of a thousand-year-old cathedral, if he was ready to go to war.

The truth of the story is that the king in question has only five sons, and as it is that’s four sons too many, and when he asks them what the world looks like to them, he really means to ask what kind of king they’d like to be. And he gives them a year and a season, exactly, to arrive at an answer by their own devices.

Another way to spin that same question: _Where are you running off to now?_ His mother loves that one, hadn’t hesitated to trot it out the last time she found him at the wyvern pens, giving Buttercup’s wings a good rubdown. He’d already killed a whole stag for Buttercup just the day before, smoked the meat himself in long strips to keep her happy on the road. _Sometimes I think you’ll fly to every corner of the world before you’re satisfied, my son._

Claude had laughed, even if part of him felt ten years old again, nursing a broken shoulder after his first fall from the sky. _There’s an old idiom here about fruits and trees, mother._ _Which one of us was the boundary-breaker first? The one who emerged from the Throat of the green dragon, the one who crossed the western mountains like a tempest off the sea—_

 _That’s different,_ protested his mother, but she’d been smiling, in a bit of a put-upon way. Always too quick to pardon him, in spite of all her pride and posturing. _Which one of us settled down, after she made it over those mountains?_ She looked at him a long time, straight in those bottle-green eyes she’d given him, before she added, _I found what I was looking for. Haven’t you?_

Claude looked back at her a long moment. All around the air still smelled of pine, of the hard-edged Almyran winter, though the mornings had been warming up early this year. Once they warmed up a little more, he’d be gone. Already flying ahead to head springtime off at the pass.

 _Can’t find it if I don’t quite know what it is, or the best way to get it_. _There’s just so much world out there, mother—how can anyone ever feel like they’ve seen enough?_

 _My Khalid,_ said his mother then, softly, the name a leaf in the wind, already fluttering out of her grasp. She’d reached out and touched his cheek, cupping it in her hand like she meant to impress its shape upon her memory. _My boy with the wandering heart. None of us ever could keep you on the ground, could we?_

It hadn’t been the plan to go south, to cross the sea and then the sands and take a room in a tall stone house with a courtyard open to the sky. In truth, there hadn’t been much of a plan to start with, and there still isn’t, though far be it for Claude to admit to another living soul just how much he makes up as he goes along. He’s only following the world’s roads, listening to the gossip of travelers and passersby, wondering if there exists a place where all those roads might meet.

He hasn’t looked back since he set out. Nor has he written home, but for one note he’d left with the harbormaster at the last port town to tell his mother he was still alive. Maybe it stands to reason that the sort of life he’s making here is by some wonderful irony nothing to write home about, in this place that had once been called the City of Illusion, where he can feel the magic embedded in every stone, every drop of water. He sleeps and he eats and helps Ametrine balance her books, and tells stories to her guests in the evenings. Sometimes he even thinks he’d have loved to be that, and just that, in another life. A storyteller, maybe even a bard.

Besides the one about the king and his seven sons, there’s one about an underground city, where the inhabitants learn to make their own light. A handful about a general undefeated in a hundred battles. And one he’s still working on, that always comes out slightly different each time he tells it, about a black beast in a dark, dark forest. These, too, he makes up as he goes along.

Some nights, he still goes flying, calls Buttercup down from the rooftops and takes wing out beyond the city limits. Not far, never far; always within sight of the walls, as Ametrine likes to warn him that bearings lost out in their particular wilderness won’t be so easily found. But people tend to discover things in the desert, or so he’s heard—and on such nights Claude looks down at the glimmering dunes, unrolling all around them like the waves on a second ocean, and thinks, _Show me._

* * *

There’s a story Claude’s been trying to tell himself, that starts here: when he’d woken up on a tiny cot in a tiny tent, somewhere in the hills around Garreg Mach, and seen moonlight through the canvas. His left arm had been wrapped in a tight bandage, splinted from wrist to elbow. And he’d felt his heart beating.

There was something kind of wrong about it. He could tell as soon as he opened his eyes—the way he’d nearly taken it for a drum with the racket it was making, pounding and pounding away in his chest. For those first few long seconds it had been hard to breathe, every inhale whistling and wheezing, even with a draft blowing in through the tent flaps. Then Claude reached up with his right hand—unbroken, though there were blisters on the fingertips and the heel of the palm was scraped raw, like he’d stuck it out to break a bad fall—and slapped himself soundly on the cheeks, once. The air came easier, after that.

He rolled onto his side and stood up from the cot, so much more slowly than he was used to, every joint protesting as he made his way to the entrance and lifted the flap. For a second—he thought the monastery might still be on the other side. It all seemed so real, just then: the bells in the cathedral beginning to toll vespers, the doors of the dining hall standing open, faces he recognized coming and going. Then his eyes caught up, and he saw the hills all bare with winter, dotted here and there with the same tumbledown tents. Garreg Mach just a shadow in the distance, edged in ghostly silver by the waning moon.

So they’d lost, and then they’d run. Claude found he could guess at the parts he couldn’t remember, easily enough. Because there was nothing else to be done, he took three steps away from the tent and sat down again, cross-legged in the dirt, to look up at the stars. The night wind blew his braid into his face, the escaping strands all tangled and unraveling, stiff with dust.

It must have been near midnight when Marianne found him there, a lantern in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. She had set both down on the ground when she saw him, and come down on her knees to better see his face. Claude didn’t tell her it had taken a moment for him to recognize her—so drawn and pale, the dark circles under her eyes deeper than ever. There were white magic scorch marks all over her fingers from tending the wounded. It must have been days since she’d slept.

He didn’t ask her how he must look to her, now. He’d said only, “Marianne.” Just her name on an outgoing breath, brittle as the waning moonlight. And then, “Give me a hand with something, will you?”

What came after: he’d asked her to push up his sleeve, find the blade hidden in the lining, barely wider than a surgeon’s scalpel. He’d put it in her hand, closed her fingers round the bone handle, and gestured to the lock of hair hanging by his cheek. He’d grinned at her, albeit somewhat crookedly, said, “Do it quick before I change my mind.” And when Marianne had lain her free hand against his cheek and taken what was left of his braid between her singed fingertips, he’d felt his heart beating, quieter this time.

He might have died that night, but he hadn’t. Isn’t that always how things begin?

* * *

The first time he sees Marianne von Edmund again, it’s by accident. At least, inasmuch as anything that happens in this city can be said to happen by accident, but to Claude it feels more like a kind of cosmic joke. A comedy of finding oneself in a place that’s somehow right, at a time that’s somehow right. Isn’t that always how things begin?

He’s out on a quest today, is all. He’d overheard Ametrine telling one of the errand boys to go by the bookshop, to pick up a rare tome she’d had the proprietor acquire for her—a recipe book from her homeland of Albinea, full of lore on the ancient art of meat curing. And Claude had volunteered, in his customary meddlesome way, to do it himself; two moons in this city and the road to the bookshop, at least, was one that had never led him wrong.

That had been all, in the beginning. Later he’ll slap himself upside the head and say of course he should have known it wouldn’t be all, not with the wind as awake as it is today. It had practically blown him out the door of the Two Skies, the real sky overhead all cloudless and blue. It walks in his footsteps now.

“She’s not ill, I promise. She just wants your attention.” He knows that voice, even years away from the last time he ever heard it, even through a hardwood door. It stops him on the threshold of the shop, one hand already reaching for the doorknob. “And she’d like me to tell you that the bestiary you’ve been looking for all week, instead of doting on her as she’d like, has fallen behind the history books, on the left end of the lowest shelf.”

“Is that so?” The old bookseller chuckles. There’s a quiet bump and a shuffle, something heavy being set down. “Saskia here must know my shop better than I do in my old age. It’s these eyes, you see, Mistress Verdin—not what they used to be, not by a long shot. Why, in my youth, I could read a spine from across the room—”

Claude lays his hand on the door, palm flat, the better to be a little closer to those voices—but not too close, not yet.

“Cats have long memories, you see, and they notice much more than they let on,” says Marianne, and there’s a bit of a laugh in her voice, too. A lightness he finds he doesn’t recognize. That bit’s new. “Though they’ll only tell you so if it suits them, of course.”

“Perhaps I ought to learn to speak to them as you do, Mistress Verdin. It’d give Saskia fewer reasons to be cross with me, I bet, if nothing else…” Rustling paper. A brief tinkling note, as from a ringing bell. “There. You take care, now.”

The door gives beneath Claude’s hand, and then swings open, and there is Marianne on the other side. Marianne in cream-colored linen, with a pair of thick books in her arms and her hair cut to the shoulders, the wispy waves blowing about her face in the draft that passes through. She must have still been laughing when she opened it; it’s lingering, still, at the corners of her mouth and in her eyes.

She looks like something out of one of his stories. No, she looks like she has a good story or two of her own to tell, this Marianne; sweet-voiced and steady-eyed, everything and nothing at all like he remembers.

He’s sure it must be the mirror of his own expression he sees in her face a beat later, when her gaze comes up to meet his—naked surprise, then recognition. A flicker of doubt. Recognition again.

“I know you,” she says, softly, as the door closes behind her. She doesn’t say his name, though she looks like she’s about to, for a moment. Like she’s only just remembered where they are, and caught herself. “Don’t I?”

“Verdin,” says Claude, when everything in him seems to rise to say _Marianne,_ as if in welcome. “Verdin, a kind of desert songbird, with grey wings and yellow head-feathers. Hardy, and fast-flying.” On instinct, he’s stepped back to give her space—but his eyes have stayed on her face, transfixed. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose are freckled lightly from the sun. “I know you.”

* * *

In the end, they don’t speak much, that first time. Claude’s not too proud to chalk this up to his own cowardice, though Marianne, bless her generous heart after all these years, is quick enough to give him an out. She has a second call to pay, at the blacksmith’s—something about a colicky horse, and she promised to be by before noon. She presses his arm briefly in farewell, though neither of them quite get around to saying, _I’ll see you again._

The next day goes by ordinarily enough, the next week, the next fortnight. Spring turns, giving way to a dusty, burning summer, all open windows and fruit-sellers hawking watermelons, and the pipers in the squares playing, always playing for the absent winds. On the third Sunday since the bookshop, Claude accompanies Ametrine to market.

“Verdin,” she repeats, knocking on the mottled shell of one melon, then the other two beside it. She seems to like the sound of one, and lifts it up, testing its weight. “Verdin, Verdin… There’s a lady by that name up at the School. One of the Master Faunamancer’s favorites, if I recall correctly.”

“Do you just know everyone in this town?” Claude raises his eyebrows, but accepts the melon when she passes it to him, tucking it under one arm. A basketful of figs follows, hung from the crook of his other arm, and then a veritable bouquet of herbs wrapped in brown paper, to be carried in hand. “Half the city must attend that school. I can’t imagine how you placed her so fast.”

“Half the city also likes to stop at my house for spiced wine and a good yarn or two, haven’t you noticed?” says Ametrine, her own hands blissfully empty but for the purse she’s opening to pay the merchant. “What’s this Verdin to you, anyway? An old flame or something?”

 _What a question,_ Claude almost says. He’s almost thankful, now, to be so burdened down with produce. It’ll keep him from rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck, scratching at his head—looking as out of joint as he feels, to have been caught tongue-tied for once.

“An old friend, I suppose. We went to school together too, for a time.” He shoulders his way gingerly past two women walking arm-in-arm, following Ametrine up the street. To the butcher’s next, she’d said earlier, to pick up a couple of chickens and some lamb for the kitchen. If they’re lucky, they’ll find a goat for Buttercup, care of the newly arrived caravans. “That was years ago, though.”

“Oh, well, that’s good then, isn’t it? Don’t know any travelers this side of the sea who couldn’t use a friend in a strange place.” It’s a question that demands no answer—Claude can’t decide if this is meant to be a mercy, or its own kind of small punishment. “You should go visit her.”

As if that’s something he can just do. She makes it sound so easy he’s suddenly considering it seriously, despite himself. “You think so?”

“Why not?” says Ametrine, airily, two steps ahead. “You’d have to go on foot, but the road to the School of Morfis bends for those who need to walk it. So if you really want to see her, Kite, then you will—small magics.”

* * *

Claude remembers, perhaps too clearly, that it had been raining at the Alliance roundtable conference in the fourth year of the war. The clouds had blown in from the north, and even with the windows of the war room shut he could hear the restless ocean groaning, foaming away all around. And Marianne von Edmund hadn’t come.

Looking back on it now, this wasn’t in itself a strange thing. They’d been a busy, bloody time, those years, and to begin with she’d never had much love for social gatherings, and none at all for gatherings of the official variety. But Lorenz had been there as usual, playing scribe at his father’s right hand, and Lysithea with her mother the elderly countess, and even Hilda had come up from the Goneril manor house on her brother’s arm, a strand of pearls at her throat and a fan in her hand. Claude hadn’t seen them—not all together like this—since Garreg Mach, centuries before now in memory.

What had they discussed that day, at the long council table in his grandfather’s house? Fortifying Fódlan’s Locket, the latest skirmish with Almyra. Holst Goneril had reported crumbling parapets along the southern wall of the fortress, catapults that needed replacing, and Margrave Edmund had pledged the gold and the land’s best stoneworkers besides. More of the same as every year, to the point that you might even forget there was a war on the other side of the border, too. He figured this was by design, at least in part.

There was pheasant roast at the feast afterward, and tomato soup, and Morfis plums in honey. Claude touched none of it, preferring to play entertainer, rubbing elbows and clasping shoulders all the way down the length of the dining room to what was for all intents and purposes the kids’ table, where he sat down in the chair Hilda had been keeping empty for him. Lorenz, wonder of wonders, had been too preoccupied at that moment to protest his unseemly presence, recounting the contents of a letter from Ignatz that had arrived the day before. Sent from a mining village somewhere in the Kingdom, it said, where he was to meet one of his family’s caravans and accompany them back across the border. They weren’t terribly dangerous work, it said, these escort jobs, at least not if you knew which backroads to make your way by.

They talked about letters for the rest of the evening—the words they’d sent out into the world these past moons, the ones they’d received, the friends on the other side. Ignatz on the long road home from the Kingdom. Leonie skirmishing with bandits on the borders of Daphnel territory. Raphael running a beloved family teahouse on the other side of this very city, delivering fresh fruit and honey to Claude’s door even in such lean times.

And what of Marianne? It had been a question for the table, and yet as she said it Lysithea had looked over at Claude with her diamond-bright eyes, as though he ought to know the answer. He hadn’t felt much like a duke at all, then—just a boy playacting in his grandfather’s too-large clothes, throwing feasts for shadows in his grandfather’s house.

None of them had meant it to be a remarkable night, and yet Claude had found himself so awake in it. So aware of small things, like the rain, like the calling of the sea down by the harbor. Lysithea had grown taller, almost a whole head taller, but Hilda hadn’t. Lorenz had begun to wear his hair long, stick-straight down one side of his face. None of them mentioned the promise to meet again, a year down the road.

* * *

The truth is Claude can think of a host of reasons Marianne might not want to see him—but there’s no need to burden Ametrine with talk of his sordid past, of course. Not when she’s been kind enough not to ask him so much as where he came from, though after living with him for a few moons she’s likely already mentally indexed the color of his skin, possibly heard him haggling in Fódlani with a handful of the merchants come down from the mainland, and drawn her own conclusions.

The truth is the story he doesn’t tell Ametrine is a story he hadn’t been brave enough to be part of; it had been easier, at the time, to run across the border into another one entirely, and allow the one he’d left behind to continue without him. Never mind that he’d been trailing loose ends the whole way, nursing a peculiar restlessness to one side of his heart, a kind of phantom pain he’d thought the end of a long war would cure. It didn’t.

Three years and he’s running again. The road to the School of Morfis bends for those who need to walk it, but Claude’s no scholar, no journeyman, no sorcerer-to-be. He can see it, certainly, from anywhere in the city he thinks to go—the hill, the School, the walls of yellow stone that encircle it. But the paths that lead to that hill turn him, seemingly of their own accord, down the oddest detours. The first time, it’s to a kite-maker’s shop, where he finds the old man and his apprentice hard at work on a kite that might take a human to the stars. The day after, a gambling hall where the players bet their time. The day after, the gates of the city itself—and here he finds Buttercup perched on the outermost wall, seemingly absorbed in conversation with the gatekeeper.

She flies him home that night, a telltale gleam in her eye and a hum deep in her throat that Claude would swear, even without a single whit of faunamancy under his belt, must be a wyvern’s laugh. He lets her have it. If the streets can hear his cowardice, too, then at the very least they lead him back the way he came with more tales to tell.

* * *

_There once lived, in a land far to the north of here, a black beast in a dark, dark forest._

There’s a thunderstorm on them the second time, after so many weeks of unbroken heat. In the way of rain in the desert, it comes down hard and fast, and Claude wonders if there will be lakes and rivers in the sands outside the city that weren’t there before, when it passes. They’ll dry up as suddenly, too, if there are—in a matter of weeks, even days.

Claude isn’t looking for Marianne this time, either. He’s not doing much of anything, just sitting on the stairs and shuffling a pack of oracle cards earlier borrowed from Ametrine, just so he has something to do with his hands while he turns the forest story over in his head again. This time of night, most of the guests should be in bed; the lanterns around the inn are low, the common rooms empty. There’s nothing to listen to but the rain on the roof, and the sound of his own voice.

_There once lived, in a land far to the north of here, in an overgrown manor house on the edge of a dark, dark forest—a girl, quite alone._

The deck in his hands, he’s heard, has crossed oceans many times over, accompanying Ametrine from the Albinean fjords to the island of Dagda, across what had once been the Adrestian Empire, coming to rest at last in this desert city that some said was the seat of the world’s magic. Claude can see those long distances mapped in the creases on the cards, the bent corners, the water-stains. He wonders if it’s made them speak more truly, or more falsely.

_There once lived, in a land far to the north of here…_

He cuts the deck, turns up the Ace of Stars. Kind of on the nose for the beginning of something. He shuffles it back in.

A door opens, somewhere below. Ametrine interpolates, her voice drifting upward in the direction of the stairs. “And it’s really just the weather, is it?”

Claude stops his shuffling. He remembers her saying something earlier about sending for a healer for Larkspur. He’d been making odd noises all day, a kind of honking and wheezing, and hadn’t come out to sit at Claude’s feet as usual, no matter how much he clicked his tongue.

He cuts the deck again, turns up a second card. The New Moon. That’s when he hears her.

“Yes, kennel cough is common in dogs and cats, especially those unused to the damp.” So close by, here under the roof of the Two Skies, the words seem to echo. “It sounds worse than it is, I promise you.” Marianne pauses, as though listening. “He also wants me to tell you—with apologies—that the puddle he drank from out back the other day is probably the cause.”

“What a rascal. I let him go out and about for one afternoon, and then this.” Ametrine’s voice rises, a touch more than it strictly needs to. It reaches Claude easily now—Marianne might not be able to hear the difference, but he can. “I’m only sorry to make you come all this way in the rain for such a minor thing, Mistress Verdin.”

“I was happy to come,” Marianne tells her, unperturbed. “A week or so of rest should cure the cough, and bone broth with a pinch of cardamom. Maybe some honey in his water, too, if he likes that kind of thing.”

She was happy to come.

Claude sighs soundlessly, pockets the cards, and stretches his arms. He lets the motion pull him to his feet and send him downstairs.

He finds Marianne on her knees by the front door, turned toward the alcove where Larkspur sleeps under the customary altar to the gods of travel. Claude can’t see much more of the patient himself than a flash of black nose, an inch or two of snout or pointed ear poking out from inside, but he must be overplaying this illness of his at least a little, if the soft and piteous wine that comes up from under the blankets she’s tucking around him is anything to go by. Ametrine stands a step or two behind her, arms folded.

Neither of them are facing him, and so he figures it’s polite to announce his presence.

“Bone broth and honey water? The dog eats better than half the guests in this inn.”

There’s a girl he once knew—one whose face he can still summon back from memory, easy as the shape of his own hand, easy as anything—who’d have jumped at the sound of an unexpected voice in a strange place. He doesn’t find her here. This Marianne only looks up, slowly, and maybe her eyes go a bit rounder when she sees him, but that’s all. She rises to her feet again as lightly as a bird might land on a branch.

“If you have so many complaints about the food I serve, my good sir, you could stand to come back for fewer helpings at suppertime.” There’s no mistaking the look Ametrine gives him, the way her eyebrows lift to see him come down. She reaches out for his shoulder, tugging him closer, affecting an extra-solicitous air. “Mistress Verdin, Master Kite, my bookkeeper-of-sorts. He’ll see you home, for your troubles.”

Without stalling, Marianne bows her head in greeting—one quick, precise motion. Her hair follows it, spilling forward on either side of her face, then settles against her shoulders when she straightens.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly put Master Kite out this way. It’s very late, and a long walk—”

“All the more you should have company on your way home.” Ametrine’s hand squeezes Claude’s shoulder, the other already reaching for the doorknob. He’ll consider it a kindness she’s neglecting to dig her nails in. “You’ll soon find Master Kite’s impossible to put out. Go on, go on, now.” And then she’s already all but pushed him out.

Marianne, who’s at least been spared a manhandling, follows him meekly onto the porch. If the door closes too quickly behind her, it’s not something either of them can protest, banished as they are. There’s a crack of thunder overhead as it shuts, even, to drive the point home.

They stand there for a while without speaking, Claude watching the rain drip from the gables overhead, Marianne busying herself with drawing up the hood of her cloak. Beyond the threshold of the Two Skies, the streets of Morfis are dark and quiet, the rain-slicked stones shining dully in the lamplight.

In the end, she’s the one who breaks it. “I really didn’t mean to trouble you. I didn’t realize you were staying here.”

“Yeah, well. I can’t say I strictly do much, but I’ve been around awhile now.” Claude looks at her sideways, grinning. It feels crooked on his face, just then. He knows he couldn’t help that if he tried. “And so have you, it would seem.”

“This will be the third year,” says Marianne. “I live at the foot of the castle hill, next to the armorer.”

“All the way across town, huh? Are you…?”

“Studying at the School, yes,” she says. A faint smile crosses her face then—a comfortable expression, almost affectionate. “They take good care of me.”

Good care. Claude lets that sink in, thinks he’d like to hear the story those words come from. A girl growing up, leaving the dark forest of her birth, becoming a woman who finds her way to a magic city. From there, what might be possible?

Everything. He can imagine everything.

“That’s… that’s good to know,” he tells her, and means it. It wobbles a little on the way out of him; that’s how much he means it. He looks away from her again, out at the web of streets beyond the doors. “Well, I’ll follow your lead—your feet would know better than mine. Shall we?”

In the dark under the eaves, with the heartbeat of the rain all around them, Marianne looks at him. Then she reaches across the narrow space between them, and—lightly, lightly—takes him by the wrist.

“I’m sorry,” she says, gazing down at the place where her fingers anchor in the fabric of his sleeve, not quite touching his skin. “We’ll have to step out together. Two steps, to let it take.”

And Claude doesn’t quite understand, not until they’ve taken those two steps into the street, and he notices the way the raindrops appear to slide away from Marianne, running off some invisible shield that seems to bend above her head and shoulders, dropping harmlessly down. He looks up in turn, anticipating water on his face—almost breaks into laughter when it never comes. He can even see the moon.

Marianne releases his wrist, smiling, and they begin to walk. The rain doesn’t touch them, all the way and back again.

* * *

Or maybe, if he’s being a little more honest, the story had started here, with the first things of interest he ever knew about Marianne von Edmund, after her name: that she always kept her curtains drawn and her door locked, and that the room beyond that door was frightfully untidy.

He heard about it from Hilda first, one Monday early in the Garland Moon. The summer rains had been out in full force then, too, and trapped them all indoors with nothing exciting to do—and he’d just discovered that she, in particular, could be motivated as much by boredom as by blackmail.

Which is to say that, wonder of wonders, he’d found her cleaning.

“Honestly, that girl,” she muttered, shoving a stack of textbooks aside so that she could attack the dust on the shelf behind them with what, in Claude’s private opinion, might have been an excess of force. “It’s not even that she’s lazy. Take it from the laziest person you know. It’s more like… like she can’t be bothered.” She sneezed, dashed at her nose with the back of her hand, glared down at the shelf before setting to it once more. “Like she’s all right just to stumble around in the dark there, tripping over all her things, and then she just leaves them where they fall. She tripped over her chair once and didn’t set it right for days.”

That day Claude had leaned in her doorway with an apple in hand, listening to the water dripping from the eaves outside. He’d taken a big bite, listened some more, and said nothing.

“Marianne?” Ignatz had sounded astonished, when Claude mentioned it on Tuesday. The worst of the rain had passed by then, and they were down in the greenhouse with Raphael to check on the plants. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. I can see the second-floor windows from the west paddock, the nights I turn the horses out to graze, and there’s never any light in hers.” He tapped his chin with a furrowed brow, worrying at the word _light_ like he couldn’t quite get his tongue around it. A puzzling, weighty word, almost foreign. “It’s such a shame, too; I always figured she’d enjoy the view.”

“I noticed it too,” said Raphael, as he pulled up the weeds that had begun to sprout around the Professor’s pet lily of the valley. “Can’t be good for her not to get any sun in there. Must be why she looks so tired all the time.”

“I wonder,” said Ignatz, “if she’d say no to a few flowers? They might liven the place up, and she’d have a reason to open her curtains then.”

Claude had looked down at the planter’s box in front of them, crowded now with bluebells and white roses and lily of the valley, the dark soil still damp from yesterday’s rain, and wondered the same thing.

“Don’t be boorish, Claude,” said Lorenz on Wednesday, so affronted it made him lay his book down on the library table and begin to gesticulate, emphatically, with one hand. “You can’t simply give a lady any old flower. Your chosen plant needs to send a message. Communicate an idea. An expression of your particular positive regard for her, and no one else. Each flower, you see, carries with it its own complex connotation. The rose, for instance…” (and Claude tuned out the rest).

“Who has the time to think about what flowers mean?” Lysithea snapped on Thursday, without so much as lifting her eyes from her History essay. If anything, her quill sped up, crossed to the end of the page before Claude could blink, and darted straight back across to begin a new line. “Do you know she just piles her library books on the floor? Tomas told me she’d borrowed the white magic treatise I was looking for, and I found it under her bed, of all places. Under her bed! Can you believe that? It’s enough to make you want to kill a man.”

“You know what Marianne’s room needs,” Leonie told him on Friday as they swept the courtyard together, matter-of-fact as only she could ever be. “A good sweeping. You just leave it to me.”

Because Claude was nothing but a seasoned expert at doing as he was told, he left it to her. He left it to all of them, and expressed no surprise when he passed Leonie on the stairs to the second-floor dormitory the next morning, that selfsame broom hoisted over her shoulder like she meant to bear it into battle. Nor when he ran into Lysithea in the library, her arms full of library books that wanted returning. Nor when he passed Marianne’s door at sundown, and heard her speaking softly with Hilda on the other side—the words muffled and shapeless, but she was laughing. Laughing. A small, bell-shaped sound, all made of beaten silver.

On Sunday, Claude took a walk in the west paddock, just on a whim, to visit his good friends the horses. He took ten steps across the grass from the fence, turned in the direction of the dormitory, and looked up—saw the curtains tied back in the second window, the pot of lilies of the valley on the sill. Thanked the gods—just this once—for an archer’s eye, and for those bells.

* * *

Thanks in no small part to Ametrine’s meddling, there is a third time, after all. And a fourth. After that, Claude stops counting chances. Small magics.

“I know why you like it here,” he tells Marianne, at summer’s end. “The birds feel safe.”

The teahouse she’s showing him that afternoon is a tiny shop cloistered away behind the main marketplace, up a narrow flight of stairs, above an apothecary. The windows are wide, draped in spelled silks of pale blue and green to entice the breezes to stay, and maybe even to linger awhile—and the verdins for which Marianne’s named herself are everywhere, hopping back and forth on the sills, flying in to perch at empty tables. They have no fear of people at all, or so it would seem.

“It’s quiet and close to the sky, and the travelers don’t tend to come all this way.” Marianne smiles as she takes a seat on the floor across from him, tucking her skirts under her. The shop’s empty today, besides them and a young woman at her books in the corner. There’s a pot of strong tea already on their table, steeping, care of the old proprietor. “It’s the perfect sort of place for them.”

 _And for you,_ he almost says. Up here, he might even make the mistake of thinking they’ve stepped sideways into a different city—much as he’s come to love the one waiting outside for them, the one they’ll meet when they descend the stairs and come back again to the labyrinth of streets. Somehow every path Marianne’s led him down has felt, each in its own way, a little kinder. Calmer, less tricksome. She looks at home in all the places they lead.

“They’re good friends of yours, then.” He reaches for the pot before she can and pours, filling first her cup, and then his own.

“Some of them,” says Marianne, as the old man returns with a plate of bread and another of cured meat and cheese. Both she pushes toward Claude, closer to the center of the table. “Those two at the window have started nesting here, this past season. Master Onyx—that’s the owner—tells me he’s made a house for them in the rafters, out of the heat.”

“How romantic. And have you given them names, these joyful newlyweds?”

“They’re not mine to name, Kite, you know that.”

“No, I suppose not.” Claude smiles. “They wouldn’t be. Here, most of all.”

“Here, most of all,” she agrees. Her eyes stray to the birds on the windowsill, watching fondly as one begins, somewhat clumsily, to climb the drapes. “But I know which ones they are. All of them speak a bit differently, you see, so it’s not as hard to tell them apart as you think—if you know what to listen for.”

“That’s a language lesson you’ll have to catch me up on sometime.” He’s distracted then by the arrival of another bird—another small one with black eyes, its feathers a startling blue. It perches briefly on the edge of their table, regarding Claude with a tilted head, before ascending up into the rafters. “Hey, you! Never seen a winged thing your color before.”

“That’s a blue bunting,” Marianne tells him. “A young male. He’s new in the neighborhood, fresh from the coastal villages, and seems to be all on his own.”

“That makes two of us, then, my friend.” Claude tips his head up, following the bird’s path. “Let’s hope you don’t lack for good company out here—but surely you won’t, charming fellow that you are.”

 _Wherever you go, Khalid, don’t go alone,_ Claude’s father had told him, after their last audience, the two of them lingering behind in the throne room after Claude’s brothers had dispersed. It had seemed a strange thing for a king to say, and Claude had chosen not to ask what he meant, letting it hang suspended like a held breath in the air between them.

After a while, he’d stretched his arms up, as far over his head as they would go, and followed his father over to the nearest window. Together they looked out at the courtyard below, taking in the bare branches of the tamarisk trees reddening in the dusk. And beyond that, their shining city. And beyond that, the mountains.

He’d felt in that moment like he wanted to hold Almyra—hold the land itself in his hands, so warm and alive even in the dead of winter, and pull it close to him, and not let it go. Then he’d let it go.

He'd said, _I won’t be alone._

Now, he comes back down and sees Marianne across the table, watching him with her chin resting on her folded hands, trusting and near. His eyes are full of impossible blue.

“Tell me how you found this place,” Claude says.

* * *

One thing that couldn’t have been a beginning, but had felt like one at the time: the night after they took Fort Merceus, Claude had watched Leonie build a fire.

Except that’s kind of telling it sideways, in that by the time the fire had started happening, there was no fort to speak of. No piles of rubble or ash, even, to mark the place where it had been, just a stretch of ground scorched bare by some terrible magic none of them could identify. The memory of that blast alone had been more than enough to kill whatever feeble joy the Alliance army might have taken in the victory. Having to set up camp with a not-insubstantial number of Almyran battalions their leader appeared to have summoned from seemingly nowhere? Salt in the wounds, no doubt.

None of the rank and file had uttered so much as a single discontented word about it to Claude, naturally, for all that he’d have welcomed the speaking out of turn. They hadn’t needed to. One turn through the encampment and he was practically breathing the tension. Leonie and the pile of wood and kindling at her feet had looked like the eye of a storm.

“Oh, thank the saints,” was all she said when he drew up by her side. She had a skin of oil in one hand, uncorked it with her teeth without preamble. “It’s just you. You walk so quiet you scared me for a second there.”

“Just me,” Claude agreed, cheerily enough, plopping himself down cross-legged with as little dignity as he could manage. And what a relief to say it, after the day they’d all had; it felt almost as good as being off his feet. “Just your dear old Claude.”

Beside him, Leonie laughed. She came down on one knee, laid aside her oilskin and reached into her pocket for flint and steel. “You look beat. The others been bugging you with questions?”

“So many questions I’m leaking them out of my ears,” he said. “Lorenz alone could go for hours. Why are the Almyrans here? How did you get so buddy-buddy with an Almyran general? Who even are you?” He’d grinned crookedly down at his hands, spreading his fingers wide apart as if to show whoever might be watching how empty they were of anything, especially answers. “Can’t even get halfway through the first because he’s already got a hundred more.”

“How’s that for a taste of your own medicine, huh?” said Leonie. She struck a few sparks from the flint, and then a few more—and then the twigs were catching, blooming into a small flame. “You won’t get it from me, if that’s what you’re scared of. I know you’ve probably had your fill by now.”

Claude did not say, _I’m not scared._ He didn’t say _thank you,_ either, though he could already feel it warming him, welling up from within. He only folded his hands on his knees, and watched the wood start to burn.

“You don’t mind not knowing who I am?”

“What are you talking about? I already know who you are.” When she dropped down beside him, her elbow knocked against his, nearly hard enough to bruise—but she only grinned in her stubborn way and settled her weight against his arm, unmoving. For a time they leaned together there, shoulder to shoulder. ”Secrets and all. Keep them for now, if you really have to. I don’t care about any of that.”

He didn’t miss the _but,_ of course, the small unspoken caveat. Far be it for Leonie, he supposed, to lie to someone to make them feel better, especially a friend.

“For now, huh?”

“For now. Like I said, I don’t care, but maybe you should.” Leonie’s smile had softened, when he looked at her face again. Turned into something gentler, less certain of itself. Claude had only ever seen her smile like that around fragile things—sunflower seedlings, a nest of baby birds. Things she would have given everything to protect from the wind, for always, if she could.

“When this,” she went on, gesturing broadly upward with one hand at the fire, at the sky, “when all of this is over, some of us might deserve an explanation. We’ve come this far with you, after all, on what little we do know. I think that’s something, don’t you?”

Claude had tried, for a while, to think of a good answer. But nothing had come—nothing good enough in his own two empty hands, nothing smoldering in the embers, and so his eyes had wandered upward instead, as always, to the brave and immovable stars.

He didn’t tell Leonie—not then—the names he knew them by. True to her word, almost as though she meant to spare him, she didn’t ask.

* * *

Autumn comes, the winds return, and Claude does find his way eventually to the school of Morfis, on something resembling official business with one of its students. The evening he visits is temperate, almost cool, his shadow stretching long in front of him as he enters the high gates and makes his way round the back of the castle, toward the paddocks on the far hillside where the horses graze. Somewhere else, somewhere overhead and behind, he can hear a bell beginning to chime. After: the arrhythmic thud of running feet, tripping over each other, and raised voices—shouting, laughing. A dinner bell.

Claude’s first thought is how delightful it is, to know that even here mages listen to their stomachs as closely as any other person. His second thought is that he can’t remember how long it’s been since he last saw so much grass.

The third thought: Marianne’s waiting for him in the western corner, in the shade of a mesquite tree.

“Ho, Miss Verdin!” he calls, lifting an arm to wave to her. “You look right at home.”

“You made it,” she greets him, in the middle of pulling the hood of her mantle up over her head. The embroidered edges flutter, caught by the breeze, when she lowers her hands. “I hope the Doorkeeper didn’t give you too much trouble.”

“No more than the customary amount.” Claude grins, lifts one shoulder and drops it again in a shrug. She’d told him beforehand that the Doorkeeper was fond of riddles, and so when the old lady on her chair at the gates had asked him to state his name and errand, he’d bent down and whispered the truth in her ear.

His name seems a small price to pay, now, for the grass—for the sight of Marianne folding herself down to sit in the grass. Maybe a little for the knowledge that Marianne had asked him here, too, when she’s more than used to keeping this particular vigil alone.

“It’s beautiful out here.” He comes down next to her, sitting cross-legged.

“Isn’t it?” says Marianne, smiling. “One of these days I’ll show you the library.”

Claude’s about to say, although it probably doesn’t strictly need saying, that he’d love that—he never could resist a good library—but the quickening wind distracts him. It disturbs the spreading branches of the mesquite above them, rustling the leaves all over.

Then, from back the way he came, he hears it. The beating of wings. A pegasus, descending.

“That’s her, then?” Claude sits up to watch the creature land, turning above the hillside in slow circles. Even in the fading light, her coat is sleek, luminous—and dark, not white like the pegasi of Fódlan. The horn that grows from her forehead seems to shine all on its own. Not a pegasus, then. “Your…”

“One of our falicorns, yes,” Marianne supplies. “Her name is Yucca.”

“Yucca, Yucca. What a beauty.” Looking close, it’s easy enough to spot the signs of a mare in foal—the slight swell to the belly, the restless feet. “And you think it’ll be tonight?”

“I’m almost certain,” says Marianne. “She’s in good health, so we probably won’t have to do much more than observe. Falicorns like to foal under the open sky, the way pegasi do—that way they can take flight, if they need to, as soon as they’re born.”

That does make sense. He’s read the books Marianne takes out of that magnificent library he’s yet to see, on the evolution of equines and their common language, even if it’s only in bits and pieces, over her shoulder. As he watches Yucca swish her tail, turning her head restively this way and that as though scenting the wind, an old memory wells up unbidden from nowhere.

Claude deliberates for just a second, then allows himself to follow it.

“Oh, I remember.” He says it quietly, even if by now there’s no one else around to hear. “You and Leonie were up all night in the paddock that one time, fussing over Teach’s mare.”

Marianne glances at him sidelong. It’s the first time since meeting again that they’ve spoken so directly about the past. All this time they’ve been stepping around it, watching where they put their feet.

“Leonie was fussing. She was so tense, she tired herself out and fell asleep on the ground, and woke up to the foal sniffing her face…” She lets the sentence trail, twisting idly at the ends of her hair with her fingers. After a pause—and Claude recognizes it well, this habitual hesitation—she adds, “She… she visited me here once last year, you know.”

Claude’s eyes return to the sky, in time to see the last of the sunset reds bleeding out of the west, making way for the night. He remembers Leonie and her fussing. He remembers all of them.

“Is that so?” he asks, surprised by how much he suddenly wants to know. “D’you hear much from the old crowd?”

“I get a letter from Hilda, now and then. And from Ignatz.” Marianne looks down at her lap, but he can see traces of a smile beginning on her face, in profile. “I heard he and Raphael were wed in Derdriu last fall.”

A part of Claude, buried deep, stirs to hear this; full of wonder, but totally free of surprise. Those two have wandered into his thoughts these past years, frequently enough—if they still make time to cook and eat together, like he’d once known them to do. At such times he could count on Hilda to tug him away from the dining hall by the arm, the two of them muffling their laughter behind their hands like schoolchildren, muttering to each other, _one day, one day._

Ignatz and Raphael falling asleep on each other’s shoulders by a banked fire. Ignatz and Raphael volunteering for the dawn watch to see the sun come up. Now Claude can add that _one day_ to an endless list of things his friends have since gone on to embrace.

“Those two,” he murmurs. “I’m glad. I had real hopes for them.”

“We all did, I think,” Marianne says. “Even me.” Her voice then goes very, very soft. “They always seemed to hear each other in a different way, it felt like. Like their… what is it they say here… like their hearts were always very good friends.”

In the field beyond them, Yucca stretches her wings out—then folds them, and bends her legs under her, coming down to rest in the long grass. _Safe._

“Yeah,” says Claude. A crooked, shaky word, not much more than an accident on an outgoing breath. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean.”

* * *

That night, Claude falls asleep under the mesquite tree.

He doesn’t mean to do it. He and Marianne continue to talk quietly as they stand watch, about whatever comes to mind—the research she’s been doing on the migratory habits of winged equines, the guests that come and go at the Two Skies. The twelve Masters of the School, and Larkspur’s sudden courting of the shoemaker’s dog. He doesn’t remember when he slips away, half-lying against the tree trunk. He sleeps without dreams.

It’s still mostly dark when he opens his eyes again, though if he tries he can already see the paling in the east. The moon hangs low above the School’s tallest tower. Marianne hasn’t moved from her place beside him, sitting up with her arms around her bent knees, bright-eyed and awake despite the long night. When he turns to her, she brings one finger to her lips in a gesture for silence, and points.

Across the paddock Yucca is standing again, shaking her head, stretching out her black wings. Her foal—gangly, stumbling, beautiful thing—circles her on wobbly legs, its own wings flopping this way and that as it moves, the tips dragging questioningly across the ground. Then it, too, raises and unfurls them—out and up as far as they will go, reaching toward the brightening sky.

* * *

There once was a certain king who in his youth had made a name for himself as a tamer of the wild wyverns that ruled the mountain ranges on the borders of his kingdom. Rumor had it that from end to end of those mountains there was no beast to be found that this king could not break, for he had the firmest hand and the keenest eye in all the realm—and, some said, a gift for the speech of animals besides, and that it was this gift most of all that enabled him to walk with the children of the great dragons that had roamed the land in ancient times.

Whatever the truth of these tall tales that the people so loved to embroider about their king, it came to pass that the king’s prize mount eventually laid a clutch of seven eggs. When these had lain some moons in their mother’s nest of stones and scrub and were close now to hatching, warmed as they were by the fierce summer sun, the king took his seven sons out riding in the hills behind his palace, that they might see a wyvern’s clutch for the first time, and choose from among her young a lifelong companion of their own.

Now the magic of wyvern eggs is that, for all that they might appear to be no more than large stones to the untrained eye, with shells as mottled and bumpy and hard as raw marble, each egg carries its fair share of clues about the hatchling within—small prophecies, waiting for those who know to look for them. The seven princes, having learned such attention from their father, thus laid their hands on the shells one by one, and each chose in his own turn.

The eldest prince chose for himself the biggest egg, for a wyvern of imposing stature, and the second the one with the hardest shell, for strength. The third chose the one that felt warmest to the touch, for fiery breath; the fourth the coolest, for an even temper; the fifth the heaviest, for endurance over long distances; the sixth the lightest, for the fastest flight.

The youngest prince, however, of his own accord chose the smallest egg with the palest shell, which seemed to have already seen its share of hard knocks, from the web of hair-thin cracks along its underside—the one that they all knew would hatch into a runt of a thing with red eyes and strange white scales, if it hatched at all. Right then and there he gathered up the egg in his arms, cradling it against his chest as though it were his own child, and at his father’s inquiring glance simply smiled and said, _We are two of a kind, she and I—_ and so it was.

* * *

From Buttercup’s back, in the air above the highlands that border the desert of Morfis to the northwest, with the open sky above and the sands below, Claude begins a new story.

He doesn’t know it at the time, of course. He hadn’t even known until maybe three days ago that he’d be flying out this far—but in the library at the School, sitting across from each other at a long, empty table, Marianne had asked him to. More precisely, Marianne had lowered her book and set her quill aside, careful not to let the ink drip onto the pages of notes arrayed out in front of her, and said in a whisper, _Would you like to go up to the mountains with me?_ And she’d found the choice already made.

“Remind me how high we’re going,” he says now, as he looks down. This far out, the scrubby, barren land has begun, against all odds, to show some green again. Below them, the ground is rising, becoming hills, becoming mountainsides spotted here and there with twisted, reaching trees.

“Not so terribly high,” says Marianne. Her chin is on his shoulder, her hands hooked around the folds of the sash at his waist, and she speaks the words so close to his ear there’s no hiding the slight tremor underneath. The ghost of an old fear, still lingering, but pale and faded now. “The herds graze on the lower slopes, near where the river runs.”

Claude tightens his own grip on the reins, sits up straighter. Up here, with the tailwinds rushing past and the morning sun still climbing, it’s tempting to think of all the places they might go. To think of the sea, and the banks of the Airmid river, and the wild pine forests of Fódlan’s Throat, and to miss it all so sorely for a while.

It’s near noon when they land, touching down in a grassy clearing on the edge of a stand of trees. Once Claude’s unsaddled Buttercup and repaid her for her service with a haunch of lamb from the saddlebags, he and Marianne walk together, searching for wild winged horses.

“So the ones with horns and the ones without,” Claude says on their way up the slope, glorying quietly in the rustle of the grass beneath his boots, “the dark ones and the white—they all live together here, no problem?”

“More or less,” says Marianne, a stone’s throw ahead of him. “The falicorn herd tends to spread out more into smaller flocks in the warm months, but they congregate here around mid-autumn, to greet their sister herd.” She crests the rise and stops to catch her breath, waiting for him to close the distance. “The pegasi come over the sea to meet them here, and stay until the springtime thaws. Every year for the last thousand years they’ve come, or so I’m told.”

“A thousand years.” Claude’s own breathing’s begun to come quick and short as he reaches her side. What an eternity it’s been, it feels like, since he last had a mountain to explore like this. “That’s a long time to keep coming back to each other, over and over again.”

“It’s not long for them,” says Marianne, with a smile, and inclines her head toward where the ground dips past them again, the green meadow opening out below. “Look, Kite.”

Claude looks, and finds them there, just as she said. Two herds of winged horses ranging down the slope, all along the river that runs down this side of the mountain. Some grazing, some resting at ease, some young ones frolicking, rearing and pawing at each other with their hooves. And even a few stretching their wings—black feathers and white, unfolding together—beating them gently to test the path of the wind, preparing to take flight.

He wonders, then, about all the places they’ve been—and what ancient magic marks the flyways that lead them back to this one, year after year, over centuries. It must be the kind that’s existed forever; possibly the kind that will exist forever.

“Verdin,” he says. “What do they say to each other? When they all meet again, I mean.”

“The greeting itself is hard to put words for. Something about… belonging to this place, and to one another. And about covering distances.” Marianne hums, tapping an idle finger against her chin. Considers it carefully, and tries. “Something like… ‘this is where we live.’”

“This is where we live,” Claude echoes, testing the words out. “This place, here.”

“It’s a clumsy approximation,” says Marianne, modestly.

“Not so. I think it’s perfect.”

And because it is, in silence, he says it again—to the herds, and the mountains, and the clouds overhead. There’s no need to cup his hands around his mouth and shout it, and disturb the peace they all enjoy. No need, likewise, to wait for an answer. Just this, this centuries-old truth speaking itself: _This is where we live._

* * *

“So this girl in your story,” says Ametrine, a handful of weeks after the mountains. She’s fortifying the common room windows in preparation for the coming winter, recasting the wards against rot and drafts, laying spells of warming. “She spends all those years looking after this beast in her forest… why?”

Claude props his chin up on his folded hands, watching her work from where he’s perched cross-legged on the end of the bar. Unskilled as he is in the spellcasting department, he’s providing whatever help he can by way of entertainment and moral support.

“Because her father did, and his father before him,” he says. “There are places where that kind of thing sets the course of your whole life. You know how it goes.”

“I know all too well,” Ametrine agrees, affecting a roll of the eyes. “And she’s just all right with that? All alone, in the dark and the cold, only an old horse for company. People talking in whispers about how she’s a monster too, how she comes from a family of monsters. That’s going to be her life, forever?”

“I don’t know that she’s all right with it. It’s just… the limit of what she can imagine, you know? Could imagine, at the time.”

“So the story’s about how this girl of yours learns how to use her imagination. Sort of.”

“Something like that. After all, imagination is the beginning of hope. When you hit against its limits, you’re stuck believing that where you are is all there is, all there’ll ever be.” Claude cranes his neck upward, like he’ll find the next part in the rafters. “That’s why it’s the beginning of the story.”

Ametrine halts her work. She straightens up, flexes her hands, observes the smoke rising from the tips of her fingers.

“So what is it, then?” she asks, turning back to look at Claude over her shoulder. “The thing that wakes her up, I mean. You know, the thing you change every time you tell this one.”

Claude raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know. What say I let you choose your favorite disruption?” He holds up a finger, counting off possibilities he’s already tried once. “Which one do you like best? The boar prince? The robber girl? The bird with the broken wing? Or do you want me to tell you she simply woke up one day and said, _I’m done here,_ and walked?”

“What say I hex you, and then we talk about disruptions?” She looks back at the window and lays her hands palms-down on the glass, all five fingers spread. “But say your girl does kill her beast, with help or no, with a hand to hold or no. And say she does walk. Where does she go, now that she’s free?”

If Claude knows anything about the way this story ends—the real way, the true way—he doesn’t know how to say it in the Common Tongue. He’s not certain he knows how to say it in any tongue. He’s only ever approached it all this time, wheeling and diving and coming closer in spirals, over and over again.

“I don’t know that, either,” he says, softly, glancing down at his empty hands. “I’ll have to ask.”

* * *

Claude still has dreams, sometimes, about the night he followed the girl into the forest. He dreams about leaving his friends behind—about flying too far, too fast, and the fog closing in, and the trees scratching at his face in the darkness.

Marianne, surrounded by monsters. Marianne in the shadow of a scorched hawthorn tree, the fog breaking around her, pale fire between her open palms. Marianne hearing him call out to her by name and looking up; Marianne’s arms reaching up, locking behind his neck. Marianne.

 _Hold on to me,_ Claude always says in his dreams, in a voice that isn’t his, or isn’t anymore. He’s flying her into the beast’s mouth, it feels like. All around him, he can hear her calling down lightning. _Hold on to me._

* * *

The letter Marianne receives on the day of the winter solstice is unmarked by any seal or signature, carrying only a small ink sketch of a bird across the flap where the parchment folds. When opened, it begins with one word only: _Daughter—_

Marianne’s over for dinner at the Two Skies when she shows it to Claude, as a kind of reprieve from one last treatise she needs to pen for the School. Once Ametrine’s cleared their dishes, and she and Claude have allowed the possibility of stars to draw them out into the courtyard and sit together on the lip of the fountain, she takes it from the pocket of her cloak and passes it across to him without a word.

Out of habit more than anything, Claude weighs it up in his hand. Good thick paper, chosen to survive a long journey. Next to the bird, an unmarked circle of black wax. And he recognizes the writing quickly enough.

 _Daughter,_ says the letter. _It is nearly three years to the day now since your departure for the City of Illusion. You will forgive an old man, I trust, for beginning this with such an obvious remark on the passing of time. I only—_

“He’s going soft in his old age,” Claude remarks. “Either that, or he must miss you something awful.”

“I don’t know which would be the bigger surprise,” Marianne says, shaking her head. Her gaze drifts down, toward the water in the fountain, clear and cold in the starlight. “I’m surprised he even thinks of me. This is the third letter in as many years.”

The margrave’s handwriting is much like the rest of him: pointed, severe. Utterly demanding of one’s full attention. There’d been a time Claude saw that handwriting nearly every day, on contracts and trade agreements—and somehow he’d never been able to help feeling very young at the sight of it. Just very terribly young, no matter how many years passed. He’d remembered feeling for Marianne, thinking he understood something about what it meant to live with a person whose whole being seemed to cast such a long shadow.

“Well, it’d be timely, with your graduation coming up and all.” He folds the letter back up, regarding her curiously as he returns it. “Have you thought about what you’d like to do, Verdin? Afterwards?”

Her answer isn’t quite a laugh—just a small, rueful noise of amusement, stifled behind the back of her hand.

“The truth is I’ve been avoiding the question. Is that insane of me?”

“Never insane,” he says. “I can think of a few questions I’m avoiding by being here. Maybe we’ve all been there, in our time.”

“Maybe so. Sometimes it’s just easier.” She sighs, wrapping her arms around herself and pulling her cloak closer. He wonders if she’s hoping it will protect her from more than just the evening’s chill. “Or maybe it’s that you can’t even imagine the alternative, because it’s too big, or too strange.”

“What is?”

“Just… all of it.” Her shoulders lift and lower. “The rest of your life.”

 _Don’t go alone, Khalid,_ his father had said. They’d been deep into winter then, too, on the edge of something none of them could see. Claude hadn’t even known at the time where he’d be flying to—only that it had to be somewhere he’d never been. Some distant, unknown place he’d have no choice but to learn his way around from the ground up, all over again.

He takes those words— _the rest of your life,_ those words in her voice—and if he could he’d hold them like a letter, acquainting himself with their particular sound and weight. They’re quiet together then for a while, gazing up at the window of sky overhead as if they might read it, too.

“You know, you did come here, though, all by yourself,” he points out, gently, after a time. “That must have been big, and plenty strange—but lo and behold, you’re close to the end of it now.”

“I suppose it was. Sometimes I think I did it just to see if I could, and that’s why I don’t know what ought to come next.” Marianne doesn’t look at him—and maybe it’s neither here nor there whether it’s to spare him or spare herself—when she asks, “Have you ever felt that way?”

Claude can imagine there exists, in that moment in some cousin reality, an iteration of himself that simply says, _Yes, of course I have._ That says, _Right now, in fact._ That says, even, _Every day since I left you behind._

He wonders what he’d call that Claude. Braver, more foolish. Better at telling the truth.

In this one, what he says is, “Let me tell you a story, Verdin.”

And she does look at him then—steady, face to face—with the eyes of the stars on them, and he meets her gaze, and holds it. Claude knows he had never been able to look at her this way until he came to this city. They had never been able to look at one another this way, in the past.

“You’ve heard the ones about the king and his sons,” he says. “In this one, it’s five sons he has, not seven—and the youngest one’s an odd boy with itchy feet, who grows up wanting to learn how to fly.”

He says, “Let me tell you his name.”

* * *

Maybe—just maybe—it had really all begun here: on the front steps of Margrave Edmund’s house the week after his grandfather’s funeral, watching the clouds gather.

Dusk had been falling when Claude emerged from the margrave’s study after a day-long courtesy call, nursing a crick in his lower back, dry in the throat from talking so long. For all the winter cold, he’d been sweating, pulling discreetly at the collar of a doublet just an inch too broad in the shoulders, loosening the cravat he’d tied too tightly about his neck that morning before setting out. Then the wind had blown in through the open windows, right into his face, and he could breathe again.

Claude had found Marianne in the entrance hall, shuffling around inside the cloakroom. She’d been waiting on them all afternoon, coming and going with more tea, more food, some book or document the margrave had insisted on immediately letting him peruse. He almost felt compelled to apologize; surely this little visitation had put her out, in more ways than one.

“Your adoptive father’s a real character,” he said to her, surprised at how high his voice sounded, how young and weightless. He could practically hear the margrave all over again: _Only nineteen, you say?_

“He can be…” said Marianne, the words muffled here and there by rustling cloth. She emerged a second later with his gloves and his traveling cloak in her hands. “Intense, I suppose. I hope he didn’t give you a hard time.”

Claude took the gloves when she held them out to him, and drew the cloak around himself, a noncommittal hum behind his closed lips that was neither a yes nor a no. It certainly hadn’t been a party he’d come for, though the tea and cakes he and the good margrave had shared between them had been impeccable, but it was hardly mannerly to call a man difficult company in his own home. _Intense_ was the perfect word—so perfect he figured there was no need to say it.

Marianne didn’t press him as they stepped out together, waiting on the front porch for a groom to come with Claude’s horse. Claude didn’t miss the slight frown deepening between her eyebrows, though, or the way one hand came up to worry at a loose lock of her hair, escaping from beneath its net of seed pearls and thin silver wires. Or that the gown she had on, like the sky overhead, was grey.

“Well, I did just inherit a whole dukedom, silly young upstart that I am,” he said at last, too lightly again. He already knew she would hear everything wrong about it, easily. “Being given a hard time’s part of the description, isn’t it? Rites of passage, and all that.”

“Rites of passage.” Marianne released her hair, folding her hands in front of her. Claude let his eye linger on the place where the strand curled against her cheek, a tiny vine just shy of blooming. “He thinks very highly of you, you know. Even if he may not say it.”

“I’m glad I have that going for me,” said Claude, and tried the smile he’d been practicing—the one that had carried him here, and would now have to see him safe to Gloucester, then southward to Goneril and Ordelia. He’d have to build bridges with that smile, then see them fortified. “Times being what they are, we’ve got to keep friends close, you know? Hence all these business trips—all this going up and down the realm, assuring everyone of the whatsit. The continued cooperation between our houses.” He let out a breath, watched it puff out in the air in front of his face a moment before dissipating. “Lorenz’s father makes yours look like a real softie.”

The shadow deepened, then, turning her face haunted in a way Claude had come to recognize—though nothing changed at all about the way she held herself, still sound, still straight. Still the young lady of a fine house. But it was in her eyes, coming up to meet Claude’s own for a brief and fragile instant, watching him sorrowfully.

He remembered her in Garreg Mach last year, on her knees in the cathedral. He remembered the way the light from the stained-glass windows had fallen on her in splinters, fragment by sharp-edged fragment, as though it was shattering too.

“Claude,” she murmured, finally. “Are you sad?”

That word, _sad,_ gave Claude pause. He blinked, said it back to himself silently, not quite understanding the sound of it.

“Sad?” he echoed again, aloud this time. “What a funny question. Why’d you ask something like that, Marianne?”

Marianne had lowered her eyes, her dark eyelashes feathering down, hiding him from her now—and her from him. Claude had thought then of how she’d looked just moments before, emerging from behind a half-open door, holding the cloak he’d traveled here in, a fine thing of mink fur and velvet. Mourning black. Maybe her hands had been asking this one question all along, holding it out to him.

“I don’t think,” said Claude, and maybe he might permit this much, for someone like Marianne, “I’ve got the time for that kind of thing. There’s been so much that needs taking care of, since.” He wavered then, weighing up what the admission would cost him—then sighed, gently, and permitted a little more. “I don’t think I even really knew him.”

“Did you want to?” she asked. “Know him, I mean.”

“Maybe.” Claude shrugged, shoulders suddenly stiff and heavy, almost aching. “When I was a kid, my mother always said he liked to smoke this pipe made out of wyvern bone. Big long-stemmed thing, half as long as my arm, she said. Carved it himself, she said. Sure enough, when I got to Derdriu there he was, waiting for me on the steps of that fancy old house, puffing away.” Out of sight, somewhere in the folds of that black cloak, he curled his fingers in—tightening, tightening. “I was always pestering him to let me try, maybe teach me how to have a proper smoke. But he never found the time. Couldn’t make it fit.”

He’d have laughed at himself as he said it, if he could, out of something like habit, or embarrassment, or loneliness. Marianne didn’t laugh, though. Nor did she hesitate over the thing she said next. 

“You might make the time now, Claude. If you claimed a night or a morning for yourself… there’s no shame in that, I think, if that’s what you need.”

 _What I need._ It had been Marianne who’d brought the tea earlier, in the middle of a discussion he’d been having with her adoptive father about maritime trade routes. Claude had brought the cup to his nose and smelled Almyran pine, and felt himself in danger then, as he did now—gripped by a desire he couldn’t explain to go down on his knees at her feet, and sit there, and close his eyes awhile. To let her touch him even, just for a while, before the winter winds carried him away again. _What I need is—_

He might have followed that desire right there and then, on the steps of Margrave Edmund’s house. But then again, he might not have. Soon enough, there was no telling, seeing as the margrave’s groom took that moment to arrive, leading his horse by the rein, freshly fed and watered. And, for whatever reason, everything he’d meant to say had receded back inside him, tidelike, retreating beneath the blood.

_What I need is time with you, Marianne. Just a bit more time with you. Is that so much to ask?_

“I will,” he told her instead, as he turned to go. He might convince his body, at least, to turn toward the road ahead. “I will, I promise. You take care now.”

From the top of the steps, Marianne said, “Be well.”

As he mounted his mare, decked out as he was in her mourning blacks, Claude knew he might have turned to look back—might have stolen a moment to watch Marianne watch him leave, but he didn’t. Or couldn’t; that’s the honest version. 

He already knew, then, that it would be years before he saw her again. Still he couldn’t look back.

* * *

As a boy, Claude had heard tell that the graduation ceremony at Garreg Mach was a grand affair. Prayers in the cathedral, walking up to the altar one by one to have your name read aloud to the saints by the archbishop, a feast in the great hall during which the professors sometimes made speeches that made people cry. At the time, a not-insignificant part of him had found the idea terrifically dull.

It’s not dissimilar, he’s since been told, in most halls of learning around the world. In Almyra, in Albinea, in Dagda. Big ceremony, lots of people calling your name, lots of people watching. Big meals, big declarations. But not in Morfis, from what he understands. Apparently the mages of Morfis earn their robes behind closed doors, with only the twelve sitting Masters in attendance, all of them meditating together in the courtyard of the School from sunup to sundown.

Claude’s uncertain he wouldn’t find having to sit still so long just a bit dull, too—but he appreciates the plainness of it, all the same.

“They’ll be starting by now,” Ametrine tells him, as they take their breakfast of tea and dried figs together in the empty dining hall. Through the half-open door of the kitchen, they can hear the occasional clang and shuffle that is Cook getting proper breakfast going for the guests, but beyond that the inn might as well be deserted. So quiet it seeps down between the floorboards. “I’m surprised you didn’t go to see her off.”

“She doesn’t need me there. It’s all about her today.” At the sight of Ametrine’s raised eyebrows, he adds, “Except possibly for a few hours tonight, when I meet her for dinner, as you so wisely suggested, my lady innkeeper.”

“Celebrations like this are important, you know,” says Ametrine. “On days like this, you should be with someone who knows your name. And while you’re so considerately taking my suggestions, perhaps you might consider bringing her something.”

Claude tilts his head, affecting an expression of curious innocence. “What sort of something?”

“Flowers are common. There’s a flower-seller up the Tailor’s Hill that’s spelled her garden to grow rock-roses year-round. Or something sweet to eat, possibly? A jug of good wine?” She gestures with the teacup in her hand; the liquid inside sloshes dangerously, but never runs over. “I swear, you haven’t a romantic bone in your whole body.”

“It’s not that,” Claude says, lightly. “I just think she deserves more than a little romance. I’ve always thought that.” 

It makes him chuckle fit to choking on his tea, thinking about the kind of bouquet he might assemble for Marianne if he were so inclined. If Ametrine’s going to accuse him of killing the concept of romance, thinks Claude, he might as well go all the way. Bring Marianne a bouquet of stones, or of cucumbers, or of those goat bones Buttercup always leaves behind once she’s finished eating, picked clean. If nothing else, maybe it would wring a laugh from her, and that makes anything worth all the work.

“Say, Ametrine, where might a man get hold of a decently-sized fish in this fair desert city?”

“You want to bring her a fish?” Ametrine’s eyes go wide as saucers. “I ought to kill you. I ought to kill you now so she’s finally free of you, the poor woman.”

“I want to cook her a fish,” says Claude, with as grave a face as he can manage. Which is to say, a face that’s not grave at all. “For old time’s sake, you might say. Spot me this and some of that good wine and I’ll never ask anything of you ever again, I swear on my mother’s life.”

“You’re a dirty liar, Kite, and wherever your mother is now, I hope her life is significantly more peaceful without you in it.” She swats at his arm with the back of her hand as she says it, for emphasis, but all the same, she lets him take her plate for washing, stacking it atop his own. “The caravans should still have some snapper and pike in from the coast, if you go now. And as for your wine, the black barrel in the cellar’s the best we have.” Her voice sharpens, too markedly to be genuine—there’s a laugh in it too, for the keen listener. “But make any mischief down there and I’m hanging you up by your heels.”

“Yes’m,” Claude says, meekly, as he rises from the table. When he bends to kiss her once on each cheek—first the right, then the left—it frees that laugh as he hoped it would. “Less than no mischief will be made in the cellar today, you have my word.”

It won’t be the graduation feast they never had, and in any case it’s a bit late to be making up for lost time, but Ametrine’s seen right through to the heart of things, like always. With such scores of people celebrating today, it would be kind of nice for Marianne, wouldn’t it? For at least one to be someone who knows her name.

Out the back door of the kitchen, Claude can already see the grey dawn breaking past the rooftops, and hear the bells in every tower beginning to ring from here to the castle hill—a song that begins, and begins, and begins.

* * *

Later, when the gates of the School have swung back open and released its graduates out into the wind-bitten night, and Claude has met Marianne at the door to her small stone house on the hillside—once she’s hung up her faunamancer’s robes and they’ve cracked open Ametrine’s wine, and the fish that he took such pains to prepare has been picked down to the bones and put out on the porch for the stray cats, Claude starts a story he has no idea how to finish.

They’re sitting on the floor now by the brazier table, drinking the wine out of clay cups and sharing an orange, tossing the peels into the fire. The fragrance that rises from the coals, sweet and sharp and summer-bright, seems to fill up the room.

“An ordained magistrix of Morfis,” Claude says, drawing out the words, gesturing eloquently with an orange slice. There’s a pleasing rise and roll to them that makes them lovely to say—as it should be, given what they signify. “With distinction. I quite believe now you can do anything.”

“Not anything,” Marianne interjects, with a token modesty, but she’s smiling. “Just a few more things than I used to, here and there. If I could do anything, I’d be fit to be a character in one of your tales.”

Claude pops the slice into his mouth and leans back on his hands, hums in the back of his throat when his teeth break the flesh. His gut is warm from the wine, his head clear. He feels at home.

“If you wished, you could be that, too,” he says. “I’ll say I knew a girl once who felt most like herself among the animals, who grew up into a woman who wanted to learn how to speak to them. And so she traveled far south to the City of Illusion and sought the tutelage of the twelve wise Masters, and there she learned—what do you call the language, again?”

“Many things,” says Marianne, “depending on whom you ask. Beast-speak. The First Tongue. The True Tongue, too, for some, because it was the first.”

“That’s it, the True Tongue. And when her time was done, this woman left the city where she had learned so much, and lived so long, and went…” He taps his chin, contemplating the many possibilities—so many. So many he hands them to her instead. “Hm. Where might she go?”

“Home to her adoptive father’s house, that’s one.” And it only stands to reason, Claude supposes, that that’s the first one. “To inherit his lands and become, as he had been, a breaker of horses.”

“That’s one,” he concedes. “What else? What else can you imagine?”

Marianne quiets, twisting a ribbon of orange peel pensively round her finger as she contemplates the little fire burning in the table’s center. Claude briefly wonders if she might scry for her future in it, or in the surface of her cup of wine. Then she seems to hit upon something, and flicks her fingers to send the peel into the brazier, and then it’s burning with the rest.

“It could be also that she traveled again, lending her craft to whoever might have need of it, as it was rare enough outside the City of Illusion to find speakers of the First Tongue.”

Traveling again. He likes the sound of that—allows himself to wonder again at where in the wide world someone like Marianne might choose to go, now that she’s free.

“If she wished to teach it,” he points out, reaching for another orange slice, “she might take up a position at another school of sorcery, closer to home.”

“Or she might cross the sea into the west,” she says, “to Dagda and the Brigid Islands. Meet the gulls and the whales and the other animals of the sea. Learn to sail a boat, learn to fish. Or…”

_Or go east._

The thought unravels itself before he can stop it, and already Claude can sense something inside him quickening, coming awake. Like the grey hour before sunrise, like the sight of Fódlan’s Throat opening. He takes a breath, and follows it.

“Or she might go east over the mountains. Into Almyra, supposing the lady has a soft spot for things that fly.”

Marianne’s hand, halfway to the table, goes still. It hovers in the air uncertainly awhile—the space of a second breath, no more—before she takes the cup, and brings it near, and drinks.

“What might she do, in a place like Almyra?”

“Ride the mountain ranges, to find where the wild wyverns nest. See the pine forests, and the grassland, and the herds of wild horses. And…” Claude chances a sidelong look at her—even if his grin is crooked, even if his own cup is empty. He pours himself more wine. “And because she’s a friend to the son of the king, he might come out and say to his people, ‘She travels under my protection, and let any who would lay a hand on her answer to me.’”

Marianne seems to consider this. “Do you mean she has the king’s friendship?”

“She has the friendship of a man who would be king as something of a stepping stone in the direction of something more,” he says, and it sounds so absurd as to make him laugh a little, shaking his head. “You know, for whatever that’s worth.”

“It sounds like it’s worth a lot, to me,” she tells him. And then, “What happens next?”

It’s a question that’s come up between them a handful of times this winter: _What happens next?_ If only thinking as far as next spring. Sometimes there’s a flight to a coastal town, and two ships. Sometimes there’s only one ship to take them both across the sea to Hrym, and then the long road north to Goneril, then the Locket, then the goodbyes. They’ve yet to decide—and Claude figures that if they’ve yet to settle on the matter of next spring, who knows about all the rest?

_I can’t say I know, actually. We’re kind of making this up as we go along here._

He says, “Would you come with me, Marianne? To Almyra? Speaking in theory.”

If the sound of her own name coming out of someone’s mouth under this roof startles Marianne, to say nothing of the question, she doesn’t show it. She only releases a breath—slowly and soundlessly through her lips, all the way—and draws her knees up against her chest, smoothing her skirt down with her palms.

Then she asks, “In theory in the story, or in the world?”

“Suppose it’s in the world,” Claude says. “Not forever, not if you didn’t want to. You don’t have to stay anywhere forever. But I do wonder if you’d like to see it, at least.” He wonders if she can hear the way he stumbles over the last part, tongue catching on the word _wonder,_ the word _like_. He decides he could do worse than tell it to her again, more plainly: “I’ve wondered that for so long now.”

Marianne’s chin comes down to rest against her knees. Her eyes are on the fire again. They linger there, searching, for what feels like a long time.

“And it wouldn’t be strange, you think, if I’m there?” she asks, at last—and after a pause adds, tentative, “In theory.”

“Why would it be strange?” Claude asks, even if he knows, or can imagine. The trouble is that where Marianne is concerned he’s done nothing but imagine—so many things now, for so long, that it will be almost a relief to hear it from her own mouth. “Because you once knew me on false pretenses?”

It’s only when he’s said it that he realizes it’s not exactly true. He’s done this dance before—journeying somewhere he could be a stranger, then being unmade in that place, and made again. Taking the names his people call him by and letting them grow over him, and put down roots: _Claude, Kite, Khalid._

Marianne must know this, as well. Claude remembers the bookseller’s door, on an ordinary day in the summer—how Marianne had opened that door and seen him, how she’d known who he was. How somehow she’s always known who he is, at the end of all things.

“Because I loved you, Claude,” she says to him. “And you loved me, I think.”

The words are perfect and plain. They’re the only words there are, for this. Claude takes them all, and allows them to unspool warmly into the silence of Marianne’s borrowed house, and thinks about the moon shining over the ruins of Garreg Mach—and how it had been true even then, all those years ago, on a lost and nameless hillside. She had found him there, too.

“Don’t be too hard on me, Marianne.” It slips out of him despite his best efforts, though he knows that any right he might have had to ask anything of her as good as vanished with him long ago. Maybe it won’t be beyond her to grant him this—this last bit of selfishness. “I was just scared.”

Marianne reaches across the corner of the table for his hand. When he gives it to her, she holds it between both of her own, turning it palm up like she means to study its shape.

“I never did say it either. You knew me when I was scared of everything.” She says it to the lines on his palm, the near-invisible map of fishbone scars covering his skin. Then she looks at him again. “What did you have to be scared of?”

“Just that,” Claude says. The hand she isn’t holding comes up, makes a kind of lonely, inarticulate gesture. “The false things and the true both. That you might not want to know me if you really knew me. That asking you to know me would be asking too much of you—that most of all.” He sighs, feels it turn halfway into something that might be a laugh with a little imagination, rubs at his face. “Your life’s yours. It should be only yours, no matter what.”

Without letting go of his hand, Marianne says, “You haven’t changed.”

Claude grimaces, a little stung despite himself. “I did ask you not to be too hard on me.”

“I don’t say it to be hard on you,” says Marianne—and as if in agreement the fire crackles softly, snaps, the kindling in the brazier collapsing. “I just remember you always used to tell us things like that. ‘Your lives are yours. I won’t make you promise them to me.’”

Claude’s eyebrows rise. There’s something a little eerie about hearing her say his words back to him—the way she repeats not only the thought but the cadence, faithfully.

“You remember that?”

He does not say, _I remember so many things about you._

“I remember it because I never understood it. I don’t know that you ever made me do anything. I walked with you because, for a while, your dreams were mine, too.” Her smile’s returning, bit by bit—gentle and sure, as if she’s learned the motions for breathing easier, as if she’s practicing them still. “I wanted to see if I could live in your impossible world. That hasn’t changed, either.”

 _That hasn’t changed._ For a moment Claude considers asking her to say it again. Just so he can hear it, he’d say, like a fool, for nothing more than the pleasure of the sound. He doesn’t.

“And if I asked you to walk with me again a little longer,” he tries, his eyes on her in the faint, burnished firelight, “what would happen next?”

“That I don’t know,” she admits, in a whisper. Her fingers close a little tighter around his. “We can always make it up.”

What happens next: he can’t tell. It’s hard to say if he pulls at her hands, or she pulls him—only that there is a pull, some half-accident of motion that makes them lean toward one another over the table. And then she’s assuredly kissing him then, Marianne is, hands sliding up his arms to close the distance, fingers gathering tightly in the fabric of his sleeves and holding, and holding.

What happens next: Claude’s ribcage hits against the table’s edge. His elbow goes wide, sends Marianne’s cup to the floor. They pull apart to the sound of its shattering—altogether not a kiss for a fairytale.

“Oh, I’ve gone and done it now,” he groans, winded and half-laughing, face bent into the crook of her neck so she doesn’t have to see his shame. “Look, Marianne, I’m already causing you trouble.”

The spilled wine’s a dark spreading puddle around the pieces of the cup, staining the stone red. It bends the fire’s light back toward them at bizarre angles. He’s still staring over her shoulder at it when Marianne draws back and reaches to take his face in her hands, gently, guiding his head back up.

“I can mend it,” she says, like it doesn’t matter, and moves closer, and kisses him again. Then her fingers are tangling in his hair, his arms already coming up around her waist in answer—pulling her into him, body to body. “I will mend it.”

They’re the first words he ever hears—and the last, and the truest.

* * *

Perhaps the trouble with the beginning had been that at the time it had looked—and felt—so much like an ending, and that was why Claude had—well, why he’d done with it what he did.

Lysithea had been the last of their friends they’d put to bed that night, carrying her between them on one final long, laborious walk from the dining hall to the dormitory, one of her arms looped around each of their necks. At the end of it, Marianne had taken care of most of the actual putting-to-bed, laughing as she lowered her down onto the mattress, murmuring _Good night, dear… Good night, dear._

Claude already knew he’d remember that bit, after distance and years took the rest—that laugh, the way she had spoken the word _dear_.

It had been past midnight then, and Garreg Mach was—not dark, against all odds. Not as dark as he’d known Garreg Mach could be, some nights. That night it seemed like it couldn’t ever be dark again, the way they’d set every candle in the place to burning—the way their glow still lingered hours later, remembering them all. It seemed to draw toward Marianne when she came out of Lysithea’s room, gathering at her shoulders all golden and warm.

“I’m sorry that took so long,” she said, joining Claude at the foot of the steps. “I had to get some water in her so she doesn’t feel sick in the morning.”

Claude laughed, took his eyes off her shoulders. “She really put ‘em away, huh?”

“A whole cask and then some. I’ve never seen her let herself go like that.” Marianne folded her arms, shivering slightly in the rising wind—but smiling still, her head bent upward, toward the sky. “There’s something… nice about it, actually. It feels new.”

“New, huh? Like a beginning,” murmured Claude. Almost without thinking, he turned his head, too, gaze following hers upward. “I’d definitely drink myself silly, for something like that.”

Out here, under the sky, Claude figured it wouldn’t be such a far cry to get drunk, just a little, on the sight of the stars alone. Off by the dining hall, he could hear the last of the knights singing as they wandered back to the barracks, undoubtedly stumbling, leaning on each other, and for just a moment he imagined he might hear his friends’ voices folded into the echoing chorus. Ignatz cheering, and Lorenz snoring with his head on the table, and Raphael banging his tankard.

 _Let us drink and be merry,_ they’d been singing, round and round again. A song Claude had had to learn on the fly, that very night—but the words came so easy. _All grief to refrain, for we may or might never all meet here again._

“Marianne,” he said, and for a while he’d been almost tempted to let that be the question—the sound of her name in his voice, and nothing more. But the rest caught up, eventually. “Do you want to walk out here for just a bit more?”

Marianne turned to him. The braided coils of hair around her head had come a bit loose by then, unraveling in places after such a rowdy evening. To one side of her right ear, one lock had fallen down, curling against her cheek.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, just for a while longer.”

“Not beat from taking care of everyone, then?” asked Claude, extending his arm to her. She took it readily, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow.

“I’ll miss it,” said Marianne, as they began to walk, turning deeper into the monastery grounds—up the stairs, through the gardens. The leaves on the rosebushes, the ones that had bloomed so bravely still throughout their long war, were already beginning to fall. “I’m already starting to miss it.”

“Do you, now? All of us together like that, making a mess of the dining hall like we were kids again?”

“In some ways. They never would have let us into the wine, back then.”

“Ah, you think that, but I bet you never tried.” The door of their old common room was standing ajar, the bright banners of the Golden Deer House all faded with age and going raggedy at the edges. Claude grinned, leading Marianne by the hand now, and pushed it open. “Bet you never snuck out after curfew either.”

Over his shoulder, he heard her restrain a soft, amused noise—something that might have become a laugh again, if she’d let it. He couldn’t see her mouth, but he could imagine its shape, too well; the edges of her lips, turning up against her better judgment.

“You know I never had a reason to do something like that.”

“Silly Marianne. Aren’t the stars reason enough? Isn’t the quiet reason enough?” He released her hand and opened his arms, crossing the floor to the center of the half-darkened room. Took a deep inhale, and then another, like he meant to breathe the shadows in, so he could take them with him when it was time to go. “I used to come in here all the time. Just to sit, be by myself.”

For a long moment, Marianne was quiet behind him. He wondered briefly if she might be trying to imagine it, maybe: a boy with an uncanny ability to hold still, sitting and listening to the night. Then as he turned back to her, she looked up at him, right into his eyes, and said, “You’ve changed.”

He could have laughed off something like that. Cracked a joke about being taller, more filled out in the shoulders, more devilishly handsome. He might have, once. Later he’d look back on this night and wonder if maybe that was what she meant.

Claude reached out again, led her to sit by him on a bench near the door, where the light from outside would give him a good look at her face. Their war wasn’t so far from him that he’d forgotten what it had felt like to fear he might never see it again, and he could still feel something like the ghost of that fear pressing down against his chest now, open-handed.

“So have you,” he told her. “Little Marianne, out with me after hours. Getting into the wine, sneaking into classrooms. I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Well, that’s what we fought for, isn’t it?” she said, slowly. Like she was only just waking up to the idea, here beside him. “This impossible world. And you’ve always had more faith in the impossible than anyone.” She glanced down at her hands, fidgeting the fingers together, hesitating a little. Then she smiled. “That part… that hasn’t changed.”

It was almost warm in the common room that night, out of the wind. Warm, and quiet enough that Claude had nothing to listen to but the restless thudding of his heart in the cage of his chest, spurred on by… what?

What was it, every single strange time he looked at Marianne? Call it wonder, call it hope. Call it the foolishness that came of believing in an impossible world, the same foolishness that always made him want to reach for her—pull her toward him, hold the best-beloved outline of her body hard against his and not let go for anything. He might have been able to imagine a version of himself that knew how to do all that, if he tried.

Instead, he leaned across the bench, a quiet breath escaping him to disappear into the space between their bodies, and allowed himself to reach up and tuck the errant curl behind her ear. His hand stayed at her face, thumb brushing feather-soft against her cheekbone, lingering, acting on its own.

“Is that how you’ll remember me?” he asked her. Softly, selfishly.

Outside, Claude could hear the night breeze pick up again, rustling through the rosebushes. The lanterns swayed, flickered. Marianne reached up and closed her fingers loosely round his wrist, and held on to him, and held on to him.

“Everything,” she told him, steadily and without sadness. “I’ll remember everything.”

* * *

The cup that Claude broke when Marianne kissed him is mended by the next time he visits her house, a fortnight or so later, but she’s made an unusually shoddy job of it. He can see the cracks when he turns it in the light, running all up the dark blue clay, like it might split back into so many sundered pieces if he tightens his fingers.

“Did you do this on purpose?” he asks her. They’re sitting on the floor of her room again, sharing a pot of tea and leaning together under the window—his legs splayed lazily out over the rugs in front of him, hers slung across his lap. The winter sun falls across them in pale, silvery beams, cut apart by the window glass. “Doesn’t it leak when you try to use it?”

Marianne shifts, sit up from where she’s been curled against his shoulder. When she takes the cup from him, it glows in her hands—faintly at first, from the bottom, then brightening upwards bit by bit, until every fissure glimmers like a vein of gold.

“I did, and it doesn’t,” she says, smiling at her handiwork with a visible satisfaction Claude’s never seen, and decides right then and there that he adores. “I suppose it seems rather sentimental, but I just wanted to be able to see where it’s been.” She tilts her head thoughtfully to look at him, and the secret of this particular small magic is there, right there, on her lips and in her eyes. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Khalid?”

Names, Claude knows, are no small magic. He’s known that since he arrived here. But he’s also sure he didn’t know it—not truly—before he ever heard Marianne speak his.

He looks back at her for a long, long moment, saying nothing. Then he reaches back for the cup, to set it safely on the far end of the sill behind them—that he might close his fingers round her wrist and set his lips against the hand that mended it, and trace its shape from heel to fingertips, and let that be his answer.

* * *

And when the king felt the shadow of his death upon them at last, he called his seven sons to his chambers, that he might set his affairs in order and go to meet it with a calm heart.

 _My sons,_ he said to them, when they had gathered at the foot of his bed as though they were no more than little boys who had been promised a bedtime story. _You know that each of you is in his own way my eyes, and my hands, and the blood in my veins. But I fear that all around me the darkness gathers, and my time with you grows short, and so I must ask you now to tell me, one by one, what it is that you love the most in the world, and let he whose answer pleases me best be the one to wear my crown when I am gone._

 _It can only be our land, my lord father,_ said his eldest son, who had worked longest at his father’s side, and who had since his boyhood devoted all his days to learning what he could about statesmanship and the scope of rule.

 _It is you, my lord father,_ said the second son, who was meek and tender of heart, and had walked into the room with tears in his eyes, knowing the king would never again leave it.

And so the king’s seven sons spoke their responses to their father’s final question, each in their turn. For the third son, the appointed administrator of the royal treasury, it was gold. For the fourth, the boldest of the three and the most accomplished lanceman, it was glory. For the fifth, a poet and scholar, it was the wisdom he had gleaned from the pages of the castle library’s oldest and dustiest books. And for the sixth, a musician, it was but a single person—the daughter of a count from the kingdom on the other side of the mountains, whom he had gone to school with in his youth, and who had inspired every song that had left his lyre since.

And what of the seventh son? He had sat himself on the sill of the broad west-facing window, that he might look out of his father’s room at the descending sun, and the way the day’s last light seemed to set the grass of the prairies aflame in defiance of its fading. And it might even be said that he took this light into himself, like a blessing, like fingers closing round his heart, as he left the window and drew up to his father’s bedside, and bowed to press his forehead to the back of his father’s hand in reverence for the last time.

 _The world, father,_ said the young man, so softly it barely disturbed the air in that quiet, quiet room. _It’s the world that I love._

* * *

In the House of the Two Skies, which stands at the center of the city of Morfis, there is a story the innkeeper likes to tell her guests. It begins in springtime, on the day a white wyvern crash-lands down through the open roof into her courtyard, bearing on its back a dashing, windswept stranger—

“You didn’t crash-land,” Ametrine points out, sharply, from where she stands across Claude in that very courtyard, as she packs one last waterskin into his saddlebags. This must be the tenth one-last-thing in as many minutes, but he’s not about to refuse the generosity. “You landed quite gracefully, I’ll have you know. Rather prophetic, seeing as your flying’s your only virtue.”

“What’s a good yarn for if not a little embroidery?” Claude chuckles as he checks the clasps on Buttercup’s bridle. Must be the fourth, the fifth time he’s gone over them now. “Besides, I figured you might want to keep the details of our fated meeting to yourself. Hold the thought of me close in the darkness of your heart forever, or something?”

Ametrine rolls her eyes. “The reality of you is still here, in case you hadn’t noticed, though not for much longer, gods be merciful.” She steps back, wiping her palms on her trouser legs, as Larkspur approaches from his nest by the front door. “Seems the dog’s already started missing you, though. You two birds of the same insufferable feather.”

Larkspur, who’s lived all his life in a house that isn’t meant for staying, nevertheless hangs his head a bit to see Claude go. Claude bends to scratch him behind the ears, under the chin, cradling it between his hands.

“Don’t you forget me, boy,” he murmurs, as he straightens. “But you’re right, I do need to be off soon. I told Verdin I’d be by to get her by sunup.”

“That’d be best. You want to be on the coast before the sun gets too high.” Ametrine glances up at the square of sky floating high above them, already tinted faintly pink. “Take care of each other, you hear? Wherever those foolish hearts of yours lead you.”

Claude’s own foolish heart, if he’s being really honest, is hardly thinking so far ahead, for once. It sees the city of Morfis from above, coiling in upon itself like a grand labyrinth. It sees a small stone house on a hillside, and the door opening, and Marianne pulling him into the shadows behind it, to kiss him there for the last time, warm and sure.

That will be soon enough. It’s really not the time. So Claude shakes his head to clear it, and takes both Ametrine’s hands in his.

“May the…” he starts to say, but stops, brought up short. The thought’s there, but the words aren’t quite. “There’s a thing we say, back where I come from. Blast, what is it again…?”

Ametrine bites the inside of her cheek to restrain a smirk. “I feel the tears burning my eyes already.”

“Be patient with me, will you? Do you know how ugly the Common Tongue can be?” He clears his throat, struggling to remember the way his mother had once untangled it for him, years and years ago, and tries again. “May the four winds—may the four winds go ever gently by your door until we meet again.”

_And speed you on the road you travel by._

“And speed you on the road you travel by,” says Ametrine, without missing a beat.

Claude’s jaw does not drop.

He does, though, feel his eyes go so wide his forehead aches. He allows her one moment of genuine speechlessness to relish. And then they laugh, still holding each other’s hands, the two of them so loud together it could well wake someone on the third floor.

 _Remember this later,_ Claude says to himself, chasing his next breath. _Tell Marianne._

“Gorgeous, golden Almyra.” Ametrine’s eyes are bright and knowing, almost fond. Of course they’ve looked upon his land, he thinks, of course. “I’ve wandered down my fair share of roads, the same as you.”

 _My name would be safe with you,_ Claude does not say to Ametrine—finds he doesn’t need to say. A year together under this roof and she must know it. The very house must know it. _One day I’ll tell it to you, when you’re a guest in my home. Whenever and wherever that is._

Instead, he grins, and says, “Be well, my lady innkeeper. No goodbyes.”

“No goodbyes, Master Kite,” says Ametrine. She squeezes his hands once, hard, and releases them. “Go on, now. Go.”

* * *

But there’s also no ruling out the possibility that maybe it—the possibly of it, whatever that means—had all begun at the beginning. With a girl in the courtyard of an ancient monastery, standing in the shadow of a linden tree, coaxing a sparrow into her hand. Claude had only just learned her name, then.

He remembers it so well, even now. It had been a Sunday morning in the early spring, and he’d been alone in the Golden Deer common room, reading. He had heard her voice first, drifting in on the breeze through the open door.

“It’s wonderful to see you again. The days are getting warmer, aren’t they?” A pause, seemingly listening for a response, and then she spoke again, tenderly. Words with a smile in them. “You look like you’ve been eating well. I’m glad.”

When he poked his head out from behind the door, Claude had thought for a moment that she’d been talking to herself, standing as she was with her back to him, shoulder’s drawn almost protectively down. It wasn’t until he craned his head around, looking closer, that she saw the way she had her left arm slightly outstretched, palm upturned—and the bird perched on her thumb, twittering up at her.

Claude stood still, leaning in the doorway, watching her. Watching them. Then he looked down at the ground, counted how many steps would take him across the stone floor and onto the grass, and over the grass to where she stood.

There’d been a twig on the ground, about halfway to where she stood. Claude made sure to step on it, to announce his presence—and at the crack it made Marianne had startled like she’d been hit by a bolt of lightning. Every part of her, except her hand. That had stayed still. The bird only flapped its wings, hopped the short distance from her thumb to the center of her palm to her fingers, and stayed.

A small voice in Claude said, _Remember this later._

“Hey, Marianne,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

She didn’t answer, not immediately. Her eyes darted up to his face and away again, down to the grass at their feet, her expression shuttering. A light going out. The voice said again, _Remember this._

“An earnest question only, I promise you. I’d never embarrass you in polite company.” Without taking another step closer, he raised his own hands—took care to show her they were empty, harmless—and linked them behind his head. Lightened his voice around another question, made it as gentle as he knew how to make it. “Have they got a name?”

More silence—but she did look at him, a beat or two longer than the first time. Then down at the bird in her hand, and her face had softened again, opening up to allow a little tenderness through.

“Oh, no,” she said at last. “The birds, they’re—they’re not really mine to name, you see. They just come and go as they please.”

Claude had thought he might understand that. He also wondered if she might find it presumptuous to hear him say so, so he didn’t.

“Happy to have ‘em while you do, then, are you? Will you introduce me?”

That Sunday morning, in the empty courtyard under the linden tree, Claude watched Marianne breathe out, all the way, and then extend her arm toward him—slowly, slowly, with the kind of delicacy that could only come from deep care. _Remember this._

He took a step forward, then another. The sparrow in her hand tilted its head up at him, watching him through one dark dewdrop eye, and stayed where it was.

“This is Claude,” said Marianne to the bird—and Claude, standing beside her in the quiet she’d made, had thought only, _You know my name. You know my name._

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES!
> 
> [1] This Morfis worldbuilding is indebted—not so much in terms of geography but definitely in terms of atmosphere, and the spirit of its magic, and its preoccupation with the true names of things—to Ursula le Guin’s _Earthsea_ cycle, because those books are my life and heart and happiness and I urge you to read them, if you haven’t. It also features, IMHO, the first and the Best of the fictional magic schools, so there.
> 
> [2] I did not mean for this to happen but thank you May and Gwen for pointing out that Claude's succession story is basically [the Alligator King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVDUYJo3CjU) from Sesame Street. 
> 
> [3] [_Here’s a health to the company, and one to my lass. / Let us drink and be merry, all out of one glass. / Let us drink and be merry, all grief to refrain, / for we may or might never all meet here again._](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ENmmkar0QQ)
> 
> [4] You get to say how it ends.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and happy holidays, if you celebrate them! You can find me on [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/strikingIight)


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